March was colder but less snowy than usual, so data should get lift, forecaster says

A pedestrian walks along Pennsylvania Avenue on a snow covered sidewalk past the U.S. Treasury in Washington, D.C., on Monday, March 3, 2014.

The results are in — March was unseasonably cold, as you may have noticed. But, according to an analysis from Goldman Sachs’s Jan Hatzius, there was less snow than usual.

This has big implications for the economy. After drags in January and February, the weather should help Goldman’s current activity indicator (a rough proxy of GDP) by 0.5 percentage point.

Hatzius is still maintaining the weather will cause first-quarter GDP to be 0.5 point worse than it otherwise would have been, and second-quarter GDP to be 0.5 point to 0.75 point stronger than it would have been.